New Orleans Not As Jazzy As It Was

May 10, 1999|By Howard Reich, Tribune Arts Critic.

NEW ORLEANS — The partygoers, exhibitionists, inebriates and, oh, yes, music lovers who flocked here a couple of weeks ago for the annual Jazz and Heritage Festival may not have realized it, but jazz is not exactly abundant in the town that Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong put on the map.

Once the fest shuts down, as it did on May 2, it's easier to find Eskimos on Bourbon Street than a bona fide jazz club within the city limits. Come to think of it, jazz doesn't fare much better at the fest itself, which this year booked Hootie & the Blowfish, the Isley Brothers and Harry Connick Sr. The latter is the local district attorney who moonlights as a crooner but is best known for having sired Harry Connick Jr.

And one can feel only sympathy for the real jazz musicians who play the festival, where the din from a dozen music stages and the pervasive aroma of stale beer cannot be inspiring.

Alas, the New Orleans club scene during the rest of the year isn't much more encouraging.

"There certainly aren't many jazz places to play around here," the brilliant New Orleans pianist Henry Butler told a visitor last weekend.

"If you want to survive, you either have to get out of town a lot or play something besides jazz." Butler pays the rent by playing jazz on the road and funk, blues, R&B and nearly anything else he can think of while he's in the Crescent City.

Yet New Orleans remains home to a remarkable number of jazz virtuosos, among them Nicholas Payton, Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison, Victor Goines, David Torkanowsky, Kidd Jordan, Don Vappie, Herlin Riley and Wess Anderson. Most of them, however, spend more time on airplanes than they do working local music clubs.

During a recent week of club-hopping, this listener found that the top room for jazz in New Orleans remains Snug Harbor, located outside the late-night pandemonium of the French Quarter. Snug Harbor mercifully avoids the rewarmed approximations of early jazz that one encounters at Preservation Hall and the garishly overamplified blasts of sound that pour out of the new and gaudy Storyville District club.

Instead, Snug--as everyone calls the intimate, aptly named room--generally spotlights fresher approaches to the art of jazz improvisation, and there was no more vivid proof than the dynamic Saturday night set by the great Johnny Vidacovich.

Though he's something of a cult figure in New Orleans jazz, Vidacovich is best known to out-of-towners--if at all--as drummer for Astral Project, the long-running local band that has been enjoying a measure of national acclaim in recent years.

But to behold Vidacovich leading his own quartet is a different experience entirely, for he is more than just a creative and technically accomplished drummer. He's also a clever poet/wordsmith whose charismatic readings would frighten the competition at most any poetry slam.

Playing the drums, however, is Vidacovich's primary talent, and he displayed it to striking effect throughout his first set. By merging traditional New Orleans street rhythms with lean and modern turns of phrase, Vidacovich elegantly summed up nearly a century of New Orleans percussion vernacular. Here is the rare drummer who conveys sonic power and lyric grace, intricate rhythmic figures and crisp and lean delivery all at once. Joined by saxophonist Tony DaGradi and bassist James Singleton, two of his Astral Project partners, as well as pianist Michael Pellera, Vidacovich never allowed his signature musical intensity to flag.

Once one strayed beyond Snug Harbor, the jazz pickings became slimmer. At Donna's Bar & Grill, a dive on North Rampart Street, the New Birth Brass Band proved most impressive for the lead trumpet work of phenomenal, 12-year-old Travis Hill.

At the Historic New Orleans Collection, one of the world's great music research libraries, Michael White played solo clarinet sublimely during a lecture-demonstration on New Orleans jazz funerals. And at Vaughan's, a rowdy cross between a frat house and a road house, trumpeter-singer Kermit Ruffins offered his familiar Satchmo shtick.